The Rights to a Life
In After Long Silence, Helen Fremont tells the story of growing up in the Midwest as the daughter of Polish Catholic parents.2 She recounts some of the stories they told of their courtship in easte...
Read ItJ. David Velleman
Papers Published
Dying
Some people hope to die in their sleep. Not me. I don’t regret having been oblivious at my birth, but I don’t want to be napping at my death. My birth hasn’t figured much in my life, other than ha...
Read ItSo It Goes
Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me: there are no events without someone to whom they happen and whose finite perspective is th...
Read ItWell-Being and Time
A person can fare well either over an extended period or at a particular moment. We evaluate how well a person fares over an extended period when we speak of him as having a good day, a good year, ...
Read ItPersons in Prospect
Derek Parfit calls it the non-identity problem.2 It’s the problem of how to treat future persons given that any attempt to treat them better may result instead in their never being born. For exampl...
Read ItFamily History
When I received my maternal grandfather’s birth certificate from the General Register Office in London, I found that the space for the mother’s signature had been completed in the same official han...
Read ItBeyond Price
Kant argued that suicide is immoral when committed for the purpose of escaping from unhappiness. I have tried on one or two occasions to reconstruct Kant’s argument, by offering a particular interp...
Read ItA Right of Self-Termination?
Getting cancer changed my feelings about people who smoke. I remember hearing a fellow philosopher expound, with a wave of his cigarette, on his right to choose whether to live and die smoking, or...
Read ItAgainst the Right to Die
In this chapter I argue that a widely recognized right to die would have the paradoxical effect of harming some people who never exercise it as well as some who exercise it and are better off for d...
Read ItA Note on Practical Knowledge
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. – Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, 1895 Peter Pan sprinkles fairy dust on Wendy, Michael, and John, saying, “Now you can fly, but only...
Read ItTime for Action
Prologue: “All Out Judgment” [T]he event whose occurrence makes ‘I turned on the light’ true cannot be called the object, however intentional, of ‘I wanted to turn on the light’. If I turned on t...
Read ItWhat Good is a Will?
Introduction As a philosopher of action, I might be expected to believe that the will is a good thing. Actually, I believe that the will is a great thing—awesome, in fact. But I’m not thereby comm...
Read ItThe Way of the Wanton
In his 1970 paper “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” Donald Davidson introduced his solution to the philosophical problem of akrasia by framing it as a problem about the self: [2] The image w...
Read ItOn the Aim of Belief
Introduction There are several reasons for being interested in the fact—if it is a fact—that belief aims at the truth. I am going to argue that it’s a fact. But first, the reasons for taking an i...
Read ItDeciding How to Decide
By “deciding how to decide”, I mean using practical reasoning to regulate one’s principles of practical reasoning. David Gauthier has suggested that deciding how to decide is something that every r...
Read ItHow to Share an Intention
Literally sharing a single intention is easier than it seems—and fortunately so, since it seems quite impossible, at least to some philosophers. Philosophical puzzlement about how to share an inte...
Read ItThe Possibility of Practical Reason
In this chapter I argue that a widely recognized right to die would have the paradoxical effect of harming some people who never exercise it as well as some who exercise it and are better off for d...
Read ItThe Story of Rational Action
Decision theory comprises, first, a mathematical formalization of the relations among value, belief, and preference; and second, a set of prescriptions for rational preference. Both aspects of the ...
Read ItWhat Happens When Someone Acts?
A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action ...
Read ItThe Guise of the Good
The agent portrayed in much philosophy of action is, let’s face it, a square. He does nothing intentionally unless he regards it or its consequences as desirable. The reason is that he acts intenti...
Read ItEpistemic Freedom
Epistemic freedom is the freedom to affirm any one of several incompatible propositions without risk of being wrong.[2] We sometimes have this freedom, strange as it seems, and our having it sheds ...
Read ItNot Alive Yet
“Not Dead Yet” is the name of a disability-rights organization that opposes legalizing assisted suicide. They contend, and I agree, that if assisted suicide is legal, then people who decide against...
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